Mitchell Nicholson is the founder of Sierra Labs. The SIERRA Liquid Yield Token (LYT) is built to deliver the best user experience across DeFi, CeFi, and TradFi.

Sierra Protocol is the issuer of SIERRA, a liquid yield token (LYT) that offers the best risk-adjusted yield in a freely tradeable ERC20 token on Ethereum and Avalanche. SIERRA enables holders to earn passively accrue 6-12% APY compounded daily and does not require staking or claiming, holding periods or lockups, paying hidden fees or providing KYC. Its reserves are managed by OpenTrade, an institutional-grade market leader offering stablecoin yield products and is backed by a16z, Circle, Mercury, Notion and other leading VC firms.

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Oliver Feldmeier is the founder of Griffin AI, the first no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents tailored to DeFi and crypto finance.

Griffin AI is the first no-code platform for building autonomous AI agents tailored to DeFi and crypto finance. Their toolkit enables users to spin up agents in minutes, feed them real-time price, liquidity, and news data, and deploy them across multiple blockchains and wallets — all without writing code. They’re leaning heavily into multi-agent workflows, letting creators chain together analytics, execution, and risk modules under one “agent network.”

Their flagship modules include a Transaction Execution Agent (TEA) — which translates natural language into trades, swaps, and wallet operations — plus Alpha Hunter, which continuously scans 950+ decentralized exchanges to surface new listings and momentum. Griffin also embeds supplementary agents like news summarizers, price analyzers, and research bots, giving users a full “agent playground” within the ecosystem

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Alexander Zahnd is the Interim CEO and Chief Financial Officer of Zilliqa, a leading Layer 1 blockchain platform.

Zilliqa is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain platform built to power scalable, secure, and interoperable decentralized applications. As the first public blockchain to implement sharding, Zilliqa has consistently pushed the boundaries of blockchain infrastructure. With the launch of Zilliqa 2.0, the platform is evolving to meet the needs of institutions, enterprises, and developers seeking high-throughput infrastructure with the trust, transparency, and flexibility required for real-world adoption.

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Alessandro De Carli the founder at Acurast, a scalable, secure, decentralized compute network powered by the massive global base of modern smartphones.

Acurast is a decentralized, serverless cloud platform that transforms everyday smartphones into secure computing nodes, removing the need for centralized data centers. By tapping into the massive global base of modern smartphones—devices that already come equipped with advanced security features—Acurast creates a scalable, confidential, and verifiable compute network. Its mission is to democratize access to computing power, enabling anyone with a smartphone to contribute to, and benefit from, a decentralized cloud.

The platform is built on a modular architecture that spans three layers. At the Consensus Layer, Acurast employs a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) mechanism enhanced with an orchestrator, reputation engine, and attestation service. This ensures the network runs reliably and securely, with strong incentives for honest behavior. The Execution Layer harnesses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) inside smartphones to carry out tasks in a secure and confidential manner, guaranteeing data privacy and computational integrity. Sitting at the top, the Application Layer hosts decentralized applications that can seamlessly offload computations to the network. This layered design allows developers to deploy applications requiring verifiable, secure computations—without relying on traditional servers.

This architecture opens up a range of compelling use cases. Acurast can support confidential AI processing, enabling decentralized execution of sensitive AI models. It can function as a decentralized oracle, securely feeding off-chain data to smart contracts. It also powers cross-chain asset management, allowing operations to flow securely across multiple blockchain networks. Additionally, Acurast offers a framework for ethical web scraping, providing a compliant and decentralized way to collect data without centralized gatekeepers.

The ecosystem is underpinned by its native token, $ACU, which plays a vital role in the platform’s economy. Tokens are used to pay for transaction fees, staked to secure the network and earn rewards, and wielded for governance—giving holders a say in the platform’s future direction. The total supply of $ACU is capped at 1 billion tokens, ensuring scarcity and long-term value alignment.

Community engagement is a central pillar of Acurast’s strategy. Through initiatives like the “Cloud Rebellion,” users can contribute their devices, refer others, and complete various tasks to earn rewards. This community-driven model accelerates the network’s growth while reinforcing its decentralization ethos. Under this approach, Acurast has already onboarded over 100,000 devices and executed more than 300 million transactions, setting a new benchmark for what decentralized computing networks can achieve.

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Gordan Kljajic is the co-founder of GEM DiCom - The first digital commodity backed by investment-grade gemstones with a real-time proof of reserve and minimal drawdown.

DiCom, short for Digital Commodity, is the term coined to describe what GEM actually represents. The word “token” has been diluted by years of speculative hype and vaporware, so GEM intentionally steps away from that language. This isn’t a marketing promise dressed up in blockchain buzzwords — it’s a verifiable claim. Each GEM is backed by a reserve of audited, securely stored, investment-grade gemstones and cash equivalents. That reserve anchors GEM’s value in the real world, while making it transparent and tradable on-chain.

Unlike stablecoins, GEM isn’t pegged to fiat, doesn’t fix its price, and doesn’t grant redemption rights. Its market price floats freely, shaped by supply and demand. But beneath that floating price is a solid foundation: independently appraised, tangible assets that provide a real floor. Each GEM exists only because there’s a corresponding value behind it, continuously visible through real-time proof of reserves. It behaves like a traditional commodity — its price can fluctuate, but the intrinsic backing gives it substance, similar to gold or oil.

Calling GEM a Digital Commodity isn’t just semantics. It’s a deliberate legal and structural choice. By positioning GEM as a commodity rather than a security or stablecoin, it avoids the regulatory straightjacket that binds many financial instruments and fiat-linked tokens. This opens the door to a freer, more flexible model — while simultaneously offering exposure to an asset class that’s rare, historically uncorrelated to mainstream markets, and inherently resistant to inflation.

GEM bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds. It lets anyone store value in one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring forms of wealth — gemstones — without needing vaults, specialized knowledge, or accepting illiquidity. It’s preservation meets participation: timeless assets, brought natively into the digital realm. That is the essence of DiCom. That is what GEM stands for.

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Shahaf Bar-Geffen is the CEO for COTI, working on On-chain privacy for every user, everywhere.

Privacy isn’t a luxury — it’s the backbone of real freedom. It gives users the confidence to transact and explore without fear, and empowers builders to innovate without trade-offs.

COTI is a high-performance, EVM-compatible privacy layer built on Garbled Circuits, a powerful cryptographic primitive. It delivers scalable, privacy-on-demand across blockchains — unlocking the full potential of Web3 for businesses, individuals, and autonomous AI agents.

COTI is laying the cryptographic foundation for a new era of on-chain confidentiality. By combining cutting-edge privacy tech with fast, scalable infrastructure, we enable businesses and their users to interact securely — without friction and without compromise.

COTI is building a future where data and interactions remain protected by default, allowing everyone — companies, creators, users, and machines — to confidently participate and push the boundaries of what’s possible online.

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Michael Sena is the CSO and Co-founder of Recall, an on-chain arena where the community evaluates, ranks, and rewards the best AI.

Recall is positioning itself as a decentralized skill-market for AI, where communities don't just consume AI but actively fund, rank, and discover it. Its core idea is that instead of centralized gatekeepers deciding which AI models get attention, users (or “the crowd”) can back AI agents they believe in, participate in competitions, and help curate what “good AI” means. In effect, it aims to align incentives: if the AI you back wins, you earn rewards.

At its heart is a reputation protocol called Recall Rank, which transparently ranks agents on specific skills, making it easier to browse, compare, and trust AI tools across domains (e.g. crypto trading, summarization, coding, personal assistants). The platform also runs ongoing competitions in these domains: developers compete to build the best agent for a task, and users can “pick winners” by staking or backing them.

Recall aims to shift how AI is discovered, monetized, and evaluated. Instead of a few companies deciding which models get built or promoted, the community collectively funds and judges their merit. That’s a bold bet — on whether the “crowd” can reliably spot promising AI, and whether decentralized funding models can sustainably drive real innovation.

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Matt O’Connor is the Founder of Legion, a platform that provides early access to the best ICOs and pre-token sales.

Legion is a merit-based, on-chain fundraising platform designed to bridge the gap between founders, VCs, and retail investors. Projects are evaluated not just on hype but on measurable signals (on-chain behavior, developer contributions, social metrics), and those metrics are distilled into a “Legion Score” that helps determine access and allocation. Importantly, Legion claims to be MiCA-compliant (i.e. aligned with European crypto regulation) in its operations, which gives it a regulatory defensibility that many launchpads lack.

A concrete example of its traction: Kraken has partnered with Legion to launch the Yield Basis (YB) token sale. In that offering, a portion of the allocation was reserved for users based on their Legion Scores, giving “builders” prioritized access over purely speculative buyers. That move demonstrates Legion’s attempt to shift the narrative from “first-come, loudest voice wins” to “the ones doing real work deserve preferential access.”

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